weight loss

AARP has launched a new online fitness and weight-loss challenge to encourage caregivers to take charge of their own health. What are the odds that caregivers will rise to the challenge? Not as bad as you might think. The average caregiver is a 49-year-old woman who has a job and a family. She spends 20 hours a week providing care for a loved one – usually her mother, who lives alone about 20 minutes away. About 6 in 10 caregivers say …

It’s familiar advice to dieters: Eat five small meals a day, instead of two big ones, and you’ll stave off hunger and lose more weight. Except that it may not work that way. According to a new British study, the total number of calories, not meal frequency, is what counts. Women who ate two big meals a day burned the same amount of calories as women who ate five small meals. In other words, it’s the total amount of calories …

Recently, I wrote about New Year’s resolutions and that, among those 50 years and older with resolutions, 25% are working on health/fitness goals–the largest category by far. We’ve found this focus on health and fitness in a variety of other research too. For example, AARP research shows that when many people are turning 50, they set a goal to lose weight and get in shape before that big day. In an AARP study of conversations online about 50th birthdays, losing …

“Don’t weigh yourself every day” was the advice experts used to give for those of us trying to lose weight, but a growing number of studies find that people actually lose more weight – and keep it off – if they step on the scale daily. The thinking had been that checking your weight every day might be discouraging and possibly cause eating disorders if you saw that you weren’t making any immediate progress. Weight Watchers, for example, makes the …

I don’t know about you, but most of my family members and friends are trying to lose weight. Some of us are overweight and do not want to see the number on the scale go any higher. Others, like me, have lost weight and want to sustain their downsized profile. Given our single-mindedness, it’s no wonder that millions of dieters will spend $61 billion in 2013 on weight-loss programs, products and gadgets, according to market research firm Marketdata Enterprises. But …

Is the paleo diet the best for losing weight? Or how about Weight Watchers? Maybe low fat? South Beach? Atkins? Oh, stop. This whole debate over the “ideal” diet is misleading, and researchers and the media need to knock it off, says weight-management expert and psychologist Sherry Pagoto, Ph.D., with the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Pagoto, an associate professor who also counsels weight-management patients at the university’s Weight Center, says there really is no such thing as the “best” …